Retailing includes the sale of items such as goods, services, and merchandise. The products are often purchased from intermediary distributors and collected for presentation to users. Retail locations include department stores, boutiques, kiosks, malls, and mail order centers. Alternatively or additionally, a retailer can have an Internet-based electronic storefront where images of items are presented for sale. The items, in this case, may be physically located in a warehouse or distribution center.
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. The Internet consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks passing data back and forth. The Internet provides a communication pathway between computing devices.
Web pages are documents or resources of information that are often transferred via the Internet and displayed on web browsers. Many web pages are generated using markup language, for example, hypertext markup language (HTML), which is a text based language for describing graphical documents. Web pages are rendered into a graphical user interface for presentation to a user.
A collection of cohesively designed and implemented web pages is sometimes referred to as a web site. A retail web site includes web pages presenting sales items to users. The sales items may be categorized into departments such as the departments commonly found in a brick-and-mortar retail store. The retail web site, in this case, is designed to allow a user to browse departments of the retail web site in a similar manner to browsing departments in a brick-and-mortar store.
Many retail systems use web pages to provide a personalized experience to a user. Some web pages contain dynamic elements for input and output to provide a rich experience to the user. For example, some retail web pages include a function for submitting a user review related to a sale item. Other users can read the submitted user review to learn more information regarding the item. Another example of a dynamic element includes a control for changing the presentation of the information on a particular web page. If a web page includes multiple sales items, for example, controls can be provided to the user for rearranging the items by price, popularity, or brand.